Casey Seiler: Nunes' cow, fake Shelly

Look, everybody enjoys a little good-natured political satire. Unless, of course, you're the president of the United States, who has gone from hosting "Saturday Night Live" twice — most recently in 2015 — to suggesting that federal elections and communications agencies should look into whether the venerable comedy show and other late-night yuckfests should be investigated for hitting conservatives too hard.

This statement (on Twitter, of course) stood somewhat in contrast to Trump's executive order a few days later predicating the flow of federal educational grants to colleges and universities on their willingness to follow free-speech policies that some worry are chilling the rights of notorious goofs like Milo Yiannopoulos, whose campus appearances — now fading in number as his career as a provocateur recedes — prompted backlash from opponents of racist bile. But if, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, the president contradicts himself, it is because he contains multitudes — all of them devoted to his political and legal survival.

But sometimes topical satire can go too far, as we can see in the recent "lawsuit" that was actually filed in Virginia in which someone claiming to be U.S. Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., is seeking $250 million from Twitter, a Virginia-based political consultant named Liz Mair, and two Twitter accounts, @DevinNunesMom and @DevinCow, which purports to be the musing of Devin Nunes' cow. In reality, it is not.

I'll admit that whoever pulled the lawsuit together really went whole-hog to dress the thing up in full legalese with footnotes that are often delightful ("The word develop derives from the Old French desveloper, which means, in essence, to unwrap"). These jokesters have apparently even gone to the lengths of hiring an extremely realistic Nunes impersonator and managed to get him booked on several of the more credulous basic-cable news channels to defend "his" legal action.

Or at least that's what I thought, until a friend sat me down and over the course of several hours proved to me that the whole thing was not a joke, but an actual lawsuit in which a real live sitting congressman from a developed state — electricity, indoor plumbing, the whole deal — decided to sue Twitter, a Republican flack who has worked for some of the least successful GOP presidential candidates in modern memory (Rick Perry, Scott Walker) and two fake accounts. If there's a digital-legal version of self-abuse, Nunes is doing it in the public square.

While @DevinNunesMom has been defunct since last year, the suit has put @DevinCow into a realm of popularity occupied by only the luckiest bovine aliases: As of Friday, it had more than 618,000 followers (including your humble correspondent); Nunes' official account had less than 400,000. Cue sad trombone.

But for me, there will never be a Twitter parody account to compare with Fake Sheldon Silver (@ShellySilver), which was launched in 2010 as the social media platform was exploding in popularity. Sprinkled with just enough Yiddish, the account was hard-boiled yet wry (Gov. Cuomo is referred to throughout as "Mario's kid"), a combo that seemed perfect for the tortoise-like but formidable Assembly Democratic speaker.

In 2015 — not long after Silver's arrest on corruption charges — the New Yorker's Ben McGrath revealed the real fake Shelly was Aaron Naparstek, an advocate and blogger with expertise in transportation and land-use issues. (McGrath is the nephew of the Times Union's legendary editorial writer Jim McGrath, who died in 2013.)

Over the phone on Friday, Naparstek recalled how Silver's flunkies tried to get Twitter to shut down the account permanently, to no avail — the platform's rules of service allow for parody accounts that are clearly not attempts to steal the identity of public figures.

Naparstek said a friend from Ecuador told him, "Oh man, you gotta be careful — these people don't fool around, they're going to take you down."

He could see the matter from his friend's point of view: "From a Central American perspective, (Silver) was a strongman," Naparstek said. In today's political landscape, "It feels like we're going down that banana republic path."

For years, the rumor around the Capitol was that the account was run by Jimmy Vielkind, then a Times Union reporter and my officemate. Naparstek reached out to Vielkind at one point and, in order to prove his Fake Shelly bona fides, asked the reporter to think of something not-Shelly might say on the news of the day. When that line appeared as a Fake Shelly post, Vielkind knew he was dealing with the real imposter. (That was Vielkind's only contribution, albeit inadvertent: In 2017, a weary Naparstek asked Vielkind if he wanted to take over as Fake Shelly, but "he refused — he's too good a journalist.")

While it was good fun, Naparstek admits to looking back on his career as Fake Shelly with some concern.

"Given where we've gone into the realm of Ukrainian trolls deciding our elections, I'm a bit more conflicted about the legacy of Fake Sheldon Silver," he said. "...It's a Pandora's Box."

Not long after we spoke, Naparstek emailed me to say he had checked out a few of the Devin Nunes parody accounts.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union's editor. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now."

Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky. He lives in Albany's lovely Pine Hills.